[Web4lib] Predicting technology changes

[Drew, Bill]

Karen's recent post on Google and making predictions got me thinking of
one I made in a book on electronic resources for agriculture that I
wrote for Information Today back in 1994. Here is what I wrote:

NETWORKED SERVICES (INTERNET)

The biggest area of growth will been on information accessible through
the Internet. Electronic bulletin boards will continue to be around for
a long time and may migrate to such software as gopher or MUDs. MUDs
allow a group of users to interact in real-time without having to use
electronic mail. For the immediate future, listservs will continue to
provide an important service linking many users together. While many
such groups have counterparts in USENET newsgroups, agricultural
discussion groups are not widely available through the newsgroups yet.
This is very likely to change especially if BITNET ,where most listservs
are maintained, users move over to Internet and cancel their BITNET
memberships. I have seen this is being widely discussed among the State
University of New York campuses. Gopher servers have been available on
the Internet for less than three years and there are already over three
thousand sites around the world. The number of sites mounting
agricultural information is growing. When I started writing this book a
year ago there were only one or two sites, there are now over ten
including many USDA gophers. It now appears that the number of Almanac
servers has stabilized. I have seen some discussion about moving Almanac
based information to gopher. Another new tool on the Internet is the
World Wide Web. This is a network of hypertext document servers around
the world. It was originally designed by the scientists at CERN to allow
access to high energy physics research data. It is based on
client/server technology. World Wide Web (or WWW) clients allow access
to these hypertext services as well as allowing access to gopher,
telnet, ftp, and wais (wide area information server) databases. WWW
clients are now available for all types of computer and microcomputer
systems. Most will allow the use of multimedia products. Such a client
could provide a seamless interface to the internet. The user would never
need to "leave" the client except to read electronic mail and maybe to
use other local services.

How did I do?

Wilfred (Bill) Drew
E-mail: mailto:drewwe at morrisville.edu
AOL Instant Messenger:BillDrew4 
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." (Benjamin Franklin)